Products of Their Times

Maria Rosetta Bradley

For Hetty Jane Owen's mother, Rosetta Maria Bradley, born in 1860 in the mid-Victorian era, and dying in 1945 at the conclusion of the Second World War, the changes she witnessed in her lifetime were even more marked. From the heyday of empire, she had lived to see the entire landscape of the London she grew up in if not exactly levelled to the ground, then certainly changed beyond recognition.

The industrial scale of twentieth century warfare unseen in world history to this point would again have had an effect on her outlook that cannot be underestimated. It is said that the family continued through the years to worship at Jewin Chapel, trying somehow to make sense of the apocalyptic events that were taking place around them. The lives of these generations were utterly unlike the lives of their predecessors. For, Harriett Wombwell, say, the London in which she died in 1870, though changed, would still recognisably have been the London in which she was born at the turn of the nineteenth century. Not so for her children and grandchildren.

The sense of identity of each generation would in each case have been a product of their own times, and whatever labels they attached to their identity would inevitably have had a different meaning to them than they have to us today. Harriett Wombwell grew up under the Hanoverian monarchy, in an era where the main conflicts of the day were with the French. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, who himself was from Saxe-Coburg in Germany. Given the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English, such alliances with their close Germanic relatives make perfect sense. The two world wars blew this paradigm apart, and even the Royal Family felt compelled to change its own name and become the House of Windsor, a fine example of identity politics in action. Yet, Charles Eldridge and many of his fellow soldiers in the Great War continued to grumble that they were fighting against the wrong enemy, and should really have been allying with the Germans against the real traditional enemy – France. After all, the Kaiser was a grandson of Queen Victoria, whatever else you might say about him.

By 1945 however, any residual empathy that the British had with their German relatives had been utterly negated. To this day, the British attitude to the European Union has been coloured by the notion that the entire project is simply another covert German plot to dominate the continent, and throughout, British involvement in the Union was of the passive-aggressive variety. Those most enthused and committed to the project tended to be those with direct experience of the war, convinced that common trading ties were the key to long-lasting peace. As this generation passed on however, they were replaced with a more nationalistic, and confrontational political class, who preferred to retreat into a more parochial view of the world, and abhor the concept of any kind of pan-European identity development. And thus the political perspectives of Henry VIII were, for better or worse, revived and renewed.